Struggles for Home: Violence, Hope and the Movement of People

by Stef Jansen (Editor), Staffan L fving (Editor)

Overview

Based on anthropological studies across the globe, this book explores the social practice of home-making amongst people whose lives are characterized by movement and violence. Social scientific and policy understandings of home and migration tend to focus on territory, culture and nation, often carrying implicit 'sedentarist' assumptions of a naturalised link between people and particular places. This book challenges such views, drawing attention instead to unpredictable forms of dwelling in the often violent processes that connect yet differently affect the movement of people and capital. Taking seriously the political implications of this challenge, the authors do not resort to a free floating, placeless approach. Instead, through the detailed ethnography of lived experiences of displacement and emplacement, *Struggles for Home* investigates the power sedentarism may have to provide or prohibit hope. Research conducted in Sri Lanka, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Zambia, Cyprus, the Palestinian West Bank, Guatemala, and amongst Romanians and Moroccans in Spain articulates a novel theoretical framework for the development of a critical political anthropology of one of the most controversial and fascinating issues of our time - the remaking of home in migration.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781845455231
Publisher:	Berghahn Books
Publication date:	10/01/2008
Series:	Dislocations , #3
Pages:	200
Product dimensions:	6.40(w) x 9.30(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Stef Jansen is Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester. His research centres upon critical ethnographic investigations of home and hope with regard to nation, place and state transformation on the intersection of postwar and postsocialist change in the post-Yugoslav states.

Staffan Löfving is Lecturer in the Department of Social Anthropology, Stockholm University. The editor of books on Cultural Economics (2005) and Identity Politics (2002), his current research revolves around the neoliberal social contract in Colombian and Central American polities.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Towards an Anthropology of Violence, Hope and the Movement of People
Stef Jansen and Staffan Löfving

Chapter 1. Returning to Palestine: Confinement and Displacement under Israeli Occupation
Tobias Kelly

Chapter 2. Troubled Locations: Return, the Life Course and Transformations of Home in Bosnia-Herzegovina
Stef Jansen

Chapter 3. The Loss of Home: From Passion to Pragmatism in Cyprus
Peter Loizos

Chapter 4. The Social Significance of Crossing State Borders: Home, Mobility and Life Paths in the Angolan-Zambian Borderland
Michael Barrett

Chapter 5. Strategies of Visibility and Invisibility: Rumanians and Moroccans in El Ejido, Spain
Swanie Potot

Chapter 6. A New Morning? Reoccupying Home in the Aftermath of Violence in Sri Lanka
Sharika Thiranagama

Chapter 7. Liberal Emplacement: Violence, Home and the Transforming Space of Popular Protest in Central America Staffan Löfving

Postscript: Home, Fragility and Irregulation: Reflections on Ethnographies of Im/mobility
Finn Stepputat

Notes on Contributors
Index

Editorial Reviews

"[A] theoretical milestone that signposts provocative new directions for scholars and students of displacement. This volume offers an exceptional critical synthesis of emergent strands of thinking about displacement while also posing new questions about how processes of 'home making, un-making, and re-making' unfold for people who must navigate the socially transformative and uncertain conditions generated by conflict and structural violence." · Stephen C. Lubkemann, author of Culture in Chaos: An Anthropology of the Social Condition in War

From the Publisher